


Conditioning

by Kanja



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Drabble, Retrospective, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-25 08:03:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6186818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanja/pseuds/Kanja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finn struggles with the death of a comrade and a complicated relationship from his past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conditioning

**Author's Note:**

> I suck at writing in this setting. Ma bad.

Finn feels the wind knocked out of him, he's hit so hard from behind. There's only one person it can be, and the HUD bar across his vision backs him up. 

"Nines." Actually, the word is barely recognizable, speaking through the tight squeeze of his shuddering lungs. Even if it wasn't for the violence or the digital identifier, that laugh is unmistakable. 

"Your helmet's all wonked," Nines says, adjusting Eight-Seven's cowlpiece so that his helmet lays flush over his shoulders. 

"Wonder why," mutters Eight-Seven. 

Now Nines's ident key is all that Eight-Seven can see. As a stormtrooper, numbers become as intimate as a face. Eight-Seven feels himself pulling away, mortified by the fact that he can't, that Nines's hands on his shoulders won't let him move. Mortified by the thought that Nines can feel him receding away. 

The only intimacy that conditioning can't make up for is facial expressions. Eight-Seven has no idea if Nines is scowling or grinning. He doesn't even know if Nines has noticed his discomfort. Nines doesn't clue him in either way. 

"Got something to tell you," Nines says, like he says everything: a proud proclamation, the most important thing you'll hear all day. He has the voice of a captain, and Eight-Seven is compelled to give him the audience he craves. 

"Okay," Eight-Seven says. "Tell me."

"Not now." 

This is their first real mission. They are standing altogether, desperately clinging to the handholds overhead, trying not to bump and unbalance one another. (Except Nines, that is, whose entire personality revolves around the cavalier application of violence.) It's probably not a good time. 

Eight-Seven still really wants to know. 

"Come on."

There are thick plates of betaplast between them, but Eight-Seven doesn't need to see anything to know that Nines is grinning. 

"After," he says. "After we wipe these Resistance scumbags off the face of this planet and raze what's left to the ground. Don't screw it up." 

Eight-Seven is shaken by his shoulder and helpless to fight it. 

"Again."

\-- No. That's not right. That isn't who Nines is. The answer to that is a little more complicated. 

Eight-Seven is the tiniest in his class. He tests well, but he is quickly falling behind when it comes to PT. This is terrifying. All the kids know what happens when someone flunks out of the Junior Starter Program -- or they think they know. Whether it's into a Sarlacc pit or out of the airlock, Eight-Seven doesn't want to personally find out. 

Sometimes, fear is all that he can concentrate on. Sometimes it's all that moves him. 

Eight-Seven is advanced a level, skipping a year of sciences and conditioning. (He still reads all the literature during his meal breaks.) The kids get even bigger, the distance between them growing. 

The worst of them all is Nines. 

Nines doesn't test well. He is flippant when it comes to applied academics and too impatient to sit still during lectures. Often, he's made to sit out in the hall during lessons so that he doesn't disrupt the others. He zeroes in on Eight-Seven the day that he arrives late to lessons, holding his datapad up to exhibit his new assignment orders, unsure of whether he is in the right place. At first, Eight-Seven thinks he's kind, because he doesn't know where to sit and Nines is the one to gesture to the seat directly in front of him. 

The second Eight-Seven sits down, he feels pain blossoming in the back of his skull, unaware for seconds after that he's been hit. Hard. Eight-Seven can't breathe and he's so humiliated that tears well up in his eyes, but he doesn't want to make a scene. He just stares straight ahead and pretends not to notice while Nines kicks the back of his chair, laughing like a sadistic Hutt. 

That evening, at mess, Eight-Seven opens his ration box and finds that his meal has doubled. He looks around to see if it's something, some kind of new program, but it's not. At night, he falls asleep to the sound of all the stomachs in his dormitory growling in unison, excluding his own. Nines’s stomach growls the loudest.

It sounds harsh, and it is. But even the worst of Eight-Seven's instructors tend to baby him, so excited about how intelligently he speaks and what it could mean for the Program to release such a genius from their ranks, that they forget he is there to be one of many. Part of a whole. Not a liability. 

It's Nines who teaches him to always be ready. Eight-Seven learns to hop over the foot Nines shoots out to trip him. He learns to listen for the sound of a fist. He learns how the body telegraphs the intent of violence, so much that when Nines shifts from one foot to another even innocuously, Eight-Seven starts hopping and juking, only for Nines to laugh himself hoarse and rub the top of Eight-Seven’s head raw. 

They move up a level. Even though Eight-Seven has shoulders now and his extra meals are surely filling them, he's still small. There's a new Nines to contend with in this class, a new alpha male who lords over his pack with his premature height and nasty jabs. Like Nines, Owen ('01) zeroes in on Eight-Seven immediately. Worse still, he sees the extra rations on Eight-Seven's tray and beats them out of Eight-Seven's hands. Eight-Seven dodges a hail of punches until the very last one, which knocks him to the ground before he even feels it. 

He's so amped that he doesn't even realize how he's on his feet again, not until he glances over his shoulder and sees Nines holding him up by his collar. 

"Lucky," Nines scoffs, and shoves him forward. Eight-Seven realizes yeah, yeah, that was a lucky shot, because Owen is all overhead power when Eight-Seven is a small, zipping target. Owen exhausts himself, but Eight-Seven is high energy, sniping blows to Owen's ribs and sides and throat until the pat-pat-pat of blood splashing. 

Owen sits in the back of the class afterwards, until he is reassigned. Eight-Seven never learns what happened to him. One day, he simply disappears. 

It still sounds horrible. There's no way to quantify the right word at the right time, no way to properly convey what it was like in those days, when harshness was the only kindness they allowed, and so they were extra harsh to one another, bound by a brotherhood of violence. Certainly, Han Solo will never understand the man that he just shot dead, and when Finn -- it's Finn now -- thinks of how to explain it, it all comes out wrong. 

There's one thing. As Finn and Han and Chewie climb aboard the Falcon, Finn pauses at the platform, looking out. Han is right behind him, about to say something, knowing abruptly that it's better not to. 

"He never told me," Finn says. It sounds hollow and he is hollow, a void opening where those unspoken words have made their home within him. His shoulders sink. 

Han shoves him into the ship. 

"C'mon kid. We ain't got all day."

Finn is forced to find his footing and that turns his brain back on like a power-cycled droid. There's no time to waste on what never will be, there's Rey and Starkiller Base and a trillion other things that Finn occupies himself with instead as he zips around the ship. He can't stop, he can't sit still. 

It's just not in his conditioning.


End file.
